Stephanie Clifford presents "The Farewell Tour"

82 Central Street,Wellesley MA 02482

23 March, 2023

Description

If you would prefer to order your ticket by phone, you may call Wellesley Books at 781-431-1160. Your $5 ticket can be put towards a copy of The Farewell Tour bought at the event. Alternatively, you can buy the book now and your entry ticket will be free. Books will be available for pickup at the event. Please note that you must have bought your copy from Wellesley Books in order to have the author sign it at the event. Please note that we cannot issue refunds within 48 hours of the event. COVID Protocols • Masks are NOT required, but they are encouraged. ABOUT THE BOOK A rich and riveting novel with the exquisite historical detail and evocative settings of The Cold Millions and Great Circle. It’s 1980, and Lillian Waters is hitting the road for the very last time. Jaded from her years in the music business, perpetually hungover, and diagnosed with career-ending vocal problems, Lillian cobbles together a nationwide farewell tour featuring some old hands from her early days playing honky-tonk bars in Washington State and Nashville, plus a few new ones. She yearns to feel the rush of making live music one more time and bask in the glow of a packed house before she makes the last, and most important, stop on the tour: the farm she left behind at age ten and the sister she is finally ready to confront about an agonizing betrayal in their childhood. As the novel crisscrosses eras, moving between Lillian’s youth—the Depression, the Second World War, the rise of Nashville—and her middle-aged life in 1980, we see her striving to build a career in the male-dominated world of country music, including the hard choices she makes as she tries to redefine music, love, aging, and womanhood on her own terms. Nearing her final tour stop, Lil is forced to confront those choices and how they shaped her life. Would a different version of herself have found the happiness and success that has eluded her? When she reaches her Washington hometown for her very last show, though, she’ll undergo a reckoning with the past that forces her to reconsider her entire life story. Exploring one unforgettable woman’s creativity, ambition, and sacrifices in a world—and an art form—made for men, The Farewell Tour asks us to consider how much of our past we can ever leave behind. ABOUT THE AUTHOR An award-winning investigative reporter as well as a novelist, Stephanie Clifford was a reporter at the New York Times for almost a decade, and continues to write features and cover stories for the Times and other publications, including The New Yorker, The Economist, the Atlantic, Elle, and Esquire. Her magazine pieces are regularly adapted for film and television, including, most recently, Lifetime and Netflix. Her first book, Everybody Rise, was a New York Times bestseller and New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice. She grew up in Washington State, graduated from Harvard, and lives in Brooklyn with her family.